This is a far more accurate account George Anthony John Green‘s book about Frederick Engels, has performed a service to the international labour movement. Along with his comrade in arms for many years, Karl Marx, their collective works are constantly referred to by friend and foe. Now more than ever as capitalism staggers from one turmoil, and one credit crunch, to another. Because the creation of surplus value can never be resolved by a society based on profit. This is the spectre that haunts globalisation. For it is an accepted truth that Karl Marx, not John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman, has the answer to the dilemmas daily confronting the central banks of the developed countries. In a recent Observer article of May 1, for instance, “that the sense of the grinding of the gears of history, the shifting of the political plates. And that, along with creeping monopolies, growing inequality and the all-absorbing momentum of the capital markets, Marx foresaw many of the effects of globalisation, “which he called “the universal interdependence of nations', not least the effects of an international 'reserve army of the unemployed' in disciplining and depressing the wages of workers in the developed economies”, reveals that Marx’s ideas are never very far away. A Revolutionary Life, helped me identify more readily with a man I‘ve greatly admired for years. My reading of his Conditions of the Working Class in England, made a profound impression on me at the tender age of 18. John writes in a clear and graphic style, on how Engels, from a very wealthy business family, graduated from a man of action in the revolution in 1848, taking up arms to overthrow the ruling elite in Germany, to a thinker, almost equal to Marx. Indeed, John quite rightly claims, that without Engels’s understanding of Marx’s brilliant mind, much of the three volumes of Capital would not have been published. But their most famous work and the introduction to any would be revolutionary to the ideas of Marxism is of course, the Communist Manifesto. With its penetrating declaration, “It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘ cash payment‘.” ringing true every day of our lives. Both Engels and Marx however, had to combat both supporters and opponents who constantly quoted their works as scripture, rather than this or that quote being an illustration of their method of thinking, that of dialectical and historical materialism, Or as Bert Ramelson, the much respected Industrial Organiser of the Communist Party of Great Britain, advised me, “Gather the information and make a decision” Also the modern day feminist need go no further for an explanation of their present and past exploitation, than to read Engels‘s, Origin of the Family. Where once male possession of property became dominant, the pre-eminence of the mother figure was over, and exploitation of women in its every form continues to the present day. John traces the domestic travails that beset Engels at every turn, in his struggle to break with convention and to pursue a life of struggle. Describing how the rupture with his reactionary father, to the point when Frederick was confronted by Engels senior, even as his son stood on the barricades in 1848, took place. How his partner, Mary Burns, together with her sister Lizzie (who became Engels’s partner soon after Mary’s premature death) both heroic Irish Fenians in their own right, introduced him to the horrors of the cotton weavers lives in Manchester, that enabled him to write of working class life in the satanic mills of that city. The work of the famous pair is provided in detail, in their response to the campaign of the Chartists, the formation of the First International, the Paris Commune, the Indian mutiny, the building of trade unions, in Britain, Germany and America. In other words they established their role as the centre of an alternative international thinking; and in opposition to the capitalist ideas of the day. Subsequently taken up by the heroes in the pantheon of revolution, Lenin, Ho Chi Min, Che Guevara to Fidel Castro, plus millions of others, who, like me, owe a debt of gratitude to the work of Frederick Engels, so absorbingly written up in a Revolutionary Life. In a very moving account, John writes of the simple ceremony undertaken by Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, Eduard Bernstein and Friedrich Lessner, to scatter his ashes into the sea off the coast of Eastbourne, because the great man wanted no grave or monument to mark his final resting place. We can be grateful to John, for his research and the writing of the story of Frederick Engels, intellectual giant and great human being. A Revolutionary Life A Biography of Friedrich Engels By John Green Price £10
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